In a twofold announcement, Microsoft released a newWork Trend Index Pulse report, “Hybrid Work Is Just Work. Are We Doing It Wrong?” and introduced several new functionalities, enhancements, and integrations for its Viva Employee Experience platform.

The data coming out of the report reveals a general disconnect between what employees and leaders think about productivity, autonomy and accountability, and flexibility.

According to the report:

• 87% of employees said they are productive at work, while 85% of leaders say the shift to hybrid work has made it difficult to have confidence their employees are being productive.
• 57% of companies are rarely, if ever, collecting employee feedback.
• 73% of employees say they need more compelling reasons to go into the office besides company expectations. 84% would be motivated to go in if they could socialize with co-workers or rebuild team bonds (85%).
• More than half (55%) of employees say the best way to develop their skills is to change companies. However, they also report they would stay longer at their company if it were easier to change jobs internally (68%) or if they could benefit more from learning and development support (76%).

In conjunction with these research findings, Microsoft announced the expansion of its Viva platform with new capabilities that really broaden its platform, particularly in some of the friction areas employees reported in the Microsoft research, in addition to some Viva enhancements and integrations.

“Thriving employees are what will give organizations a competitive advantage in today’s dynamic economic environment,” says Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “Today, we’re announcing new innovations across our employee experience platform Microsoft Viva to help leaders end productivity paranoia, rebuild social capital, and re-recruit and re-energize their employees.”

These new Viva capabilities will begin rolling out to customers in early 2023. Changes to the platform include:

• Viva Pulse: An app that will allow managers and team leads to request regular and confidential feedback on their team’s experience. Viva Pulse uses smart templates and research-backed questions to home in on what is working well and where to focus. Suggested learning and actions to address team needs are also offered.
• Viva Amplify: An app that will allow leaders and communicators to enhance their messaging and reach employees where they are with consistency. The app provides one place for communications campaigns, offers writing guidance to improve message quality, enables publishing across multiple channels and distribution groups in Microsoft 365, and provides metrics for improvement.
• Answers in Viva: A new capability that will use artificial intelligence (AI) to match employee questions to answers and experts across the organization to help leverage collective knowledge. Answers in Viva can surface similar questions that have been answered, recommends topics and experts, and highlights the top solutions. It will be available to licensed Viva suite users within the Viva Engage app.

• People in Viva: A new capability that will use AI to create detailed profile cards with information on an employee’s interests, knowledge, and team goals to help colleagues discover connections, experts, and insights across the organization. These insights will be available through Microsoft 365 profile cards and as a new app.

Viva Engage has already been launched, but Microsoft announced it would be adding in a feature called Leadership Corners, which is a space to where employees can interact directly with leadership, share ideas and perspectives, and participate in organization initiatives.

Viva Goals has also been previously released, but now has new integrations that help bring goals into the workflow. There is a deeper integration with Microsoft Teams, an extension in Azure DevOps and a connection into Power BI datasets.

Related to the employee research data showing a desire for more development and learning support, Microsoft also announced improved integrations between Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning that will allow easier content access, right from the flow of work in Teams, to LinkedIn Learning Hub.

Microsoft is really deepening its investment in the EX market, with the benefit of already being part of many employees’ daily workflows and technology interactions.